Some friends and me heard that if you smoked the skin of an aret, you could get monumentally wasted. So we bought one at a pet store and waited a couple of weeks until it shed its skin. Then we crumbled up the dry skin, put it in with some pot, and lit up. We all got these insane mouth blisters that didn’t go away for weeks. We all had to eat soup for a month. Though maybe it wasn’t the skin; the pot could have been bad or something.

How did the misuse of the word myself come to be? Everyone now says, “Jane, Robert, and myself are going to the movies” and “They awarded trophies to Jane, Robert, and myself.” Do people use the word myself because they don’t know whether or not to use the word I or me?

We congratulate you on your penetrating analysis of the epidemic that we have dubbed the Myself Reflex. The most succinct statement that explains why so many speakers and writers misuse, abuse, and overuse the pronoun myself was cobbled by Red Smith, the graceful New York sportswriter: “Myself is the foxhole of ignorance where cowards take refuge because they were taught that me is vulgar and I is egotistical.”

In other words, speakers and writers are often addlepated or chickenhearted about choosing the proper cases for their pronouns: the nominative case ‚Äì I — for subjects and the accusative case ‚Äì me — for objects. The only three contexts in which myself should ever appear are:

(1) as a reflexive pronoun used as an object of a verb whose subject is the same: “I hurt myself climbing the walls of my home.”